Following a five hour meeting of a Senate ethics panel this week, Sen. Gretchen Hoffman apologized for sending a misleading tweet about fellow Sen. Barb Goodwin.

Hoffman, a freshman Republican, tweeted during the HHS budget debate this May that Goodwin, a DFLer, had called people with mental illnesses "idiots and imbeciles." But Goodwin was actually using those words to describe language used in a bygone era and note how much things have advanced.

The ethics panel ruled that they would drop the charges if Hoffman delivered Goodwin a written apology, retracted the tweet and tweeted once more linking to the panel's decision.

Hoffman delivered the written apology, but deleted her entire account rather than retracting the one tweet. She then tweeted the panel's decision on an entirely new account, which had three followers soon after the apology was announced.

"I am certainly sorry for my own misunderstanding of what you said and how I subsequently handled it," Hoffman wrote in her apology.

A Duluth native who just barely lost Virginia's GOP gubernatorial primary said that politicians have not gone far enough in condemning the left for violence during a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville. "I think that the left is going to try to use this as an excuse to crack down on conservative free speech," said Corey Stewart. "I think they're going to try to use this as an excuse to remove more historical monuments."